Iomega's New
StorCenter ix2-200Overkill for the home user, but perfect for the Small Business Market

If you have tons - and I do mean tons of
multimedia content bogging down your computers, Iomega’s new NAS drive could
be your storage solution. The
StorCenter ix2-200 is a high-capacity,
high-powered network hard drive that’s easy to use. It’s aimed at the
pro-sumer and small business markets, and for good reason: The average home
user may be overwhelmed with all the StorCenter offers.

Iomega’s
ix2-200 is available in three versions:
1TB ($269.99), 2TB ($369.99), and
4TB ($699.99). All of these are double drive products, meaning they have two
hard drives stored in one enclosure. As such, the ix2-200 is thicker than
your average
network hard drive, but not egregiously so.

In
most aspects, the ix2-200 is similar to Iomega’s excellent
Home Media Network Hard Drive. Like that product, the ix2-200 offers an
easy setup — you just plug it in and power it up; the rest of the work is
done for you. And, like the Home Media Network Hard Drive, the ix2-200
serves as an iTunes server, making it easy to share music and video
throughout your house. It’s also DLNA-certified, so you can use it to stream
content to compatible set-top boxes.

The
ix2-200 also features a built-in torrent manager that is, unfortunately, all
too similar to the one on the Home Media drive; it’s painfully slow. A 350MB
file that I downloaded on my PC’s torrent client in less than 20 minutes
took a couple hours to download to the drive. Still, the idea of a remote
torrent manager is appealing, especially if you’re blessed with the patience
I lack.

The
ix2-200 does feature some upgrades over the Home Media drive, as well as
improvements from its predecessor. For one, Iomega says it uses less power.
It also offers remote access from the web (a feature that was added to the
Home Media drive via a firmware update) using Iomega’s neat and clean
interface. And techie types will like that the drives are user-replaceable.
It also offers device-to-device replication, which means you can copy its
contents to any other storage device on your network without using a
computer. In addition, it offers a cool feature called QuickTransfer, which
allows you to copy data to a connected USB storage device (the ix2-200 has
three USB ports) by simply pushing a button on the drive; again, no computer
interaction required.

The
StorCenter ix2-200 is a breeze to use, but it’s overkill for most home
users. A 1TB drive will hold plenty of content, and you can get a 1TB
version of Iomega’s own Home Media Network Hard Drive for $200. That’s
$70 less for a product that likely already meets all of your home
network storage needs.